"No, George, I'm over here."

[a birthday tribute]

[originally published June 3, 2024]

Today is the Colleen Dewhurst centennial!

I’ve been told two spiffing Colleen Dewhurst stories, one of which I have no intention of repeating here, but let’s just say that it takes in Maureen Stapleton, Zoe Caldwell (in absentia), Roddy McDowall, and Miss Helen Hayes. Colleen is also, now that I think about it, in absentia from this story. Perforce, one might even say.

But the other one simply takes in Colleen (then Mrs. George C. Scott) and the aforementioned Maureen, and it takes place during a late and sozzled evening at the Scotts, at some point during which Mr. Scott rose from his chair, grabbed Ms. Stapleton by the neck, and began to throttle her.

To which Ms. Dewhurst, looking up from her own chair and taking in what was going on, blithely commented: “No, George, I’m over here.”

(By the way: If you’ve never seen The Exorcist III, (a) it’s one of the greatest horror films ever made, including one the scariest jump scares known to humankind, and (2) it features Colleen as the Absolute Voice of Literal Hell opposite George, by then her ex-husband.)

I must add that I was honored to see Colleen Dewhurst a number of times onstage, starting with Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten when I was in high school and, years later, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which she was the most astonishing Mary Tyrone I’ve yet seen in my life.¹ I will always recall how she delivered the play’s famous final line (“I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time”) not as a Famous Final Line but simply as the thing that Mary says before the next thing she’s about to say and the thing after that. She said it simply, wistfully, almost matter-of-factly, and then the curtain immediately dropped without fanfare, as if the Tyrones were just going to keep playing out their drama back there on the now concealed stage long after we in the audience had gone home, made ourselves a hot toddy and put out the cat, and gone to bed.²

The James Tyrone in that production was, to be sure, Jason Robards, and he was also, to be sure, phenomenal. The pair of them, Dewhurst and Robards—so associated and entwined that I bet that many people thought they were married, the way people thought that Betty Comden and Adolph Green were married³—were playing this Long Day’s Journey in rep with (yet more O’Neill, except funny) Ah, Wilderness!, and it was a joy to see the two of them as the comedy’s genial married elders basically goofing off for the entire evening and being charming. What a relief it must have been.⁴

Also, I once stood behind Colleen Dewhurst in a Times Square deli as she was buying a buttered bagel. She was, as I recall, much tinier than I was expecting her to be, because I was expecting her to be eight feet tall.⁵

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Thanks once again for dropping by. See you in the funny papers and/or in the comments.

1. And that includes Vanessa Redgrave, who was devastatingly, heart-tearingly brilliant, so that’s how good Colleen Dewhurst was.

2. I recall saying to an actress friend, thinking of the Vast Earth Mothery impression that Colleen Dewhurst tended to make from the stage, “How is that big strapping woman going to play frail, birdlike, drug-addicted Mary Tyrone?” To which my actress friend sensibly replied, “She’s going to act it, Benj.”

3. For the record, Jason Robards was famously married, for a time, to Lauren Bacall, the Widow Bogart, and Adolph Green was married thrice, the last time to delightful Phyllis Newman. Betty Comden, as long as we’re here, was married to a non-showbiz gentleman called Siegfried Schutzman, who did eventually take on the name Steven Kyle. (Well, wouldn’t you.)

4. The Edmund in that Long Day’s Journey was Colleen’s own son Campbell Scott, and the Jamie was the stalwart Jamey Sheridan. They too got to ham-and-egg their way through Ah, Wilderness!

5. How in fact tall was Colleen Dewhurst? 5′ 8″. So: not tiny. Shorter than I am, but not tiny.)